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This morning, The Washington Post gathered key elected officials and advocates to discuss the fate of a major bipartisan criminal justice reform bill on Capitol Hill and the most important issues on the nation’s criminal justice agenda.
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Highlights included:
- Two of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to call for a vote on the legislation before the end of the year. “I don’t know any Republican leader or any Republican member of the Senate who wouldn’t be pleased to deliver something bipartisan that the president supports,” Grassley said. Durbin added: “I would never predict a unanimous vote on our caucus side, but I will tell you, our support is solid.”
- Gov. Tom Wolf (D-Pa.), Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections John Wetzel and Rep. Sheryl Delozier, a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, discussed how Pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to pass a Clean Slate Bill, legislation that helps former prisoners find employment and housing.
- Families Against Mandatory Minimums President Kevin Ring, and two co-founders of the Buried Alive Project, attorney Brittany K. Barnett and Sharanda Jones, who was previously incarcerated but received clemency from President Obama in 2015, spoke about their firsthand experiences with the nation’s court and prison system.
- Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Larry Leiser, president of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, debated the use of mandatory minimum sentences and other provisions of federal criminal justice legislation.
- In a sponsored segment moderated by Holly Harris, executive director of the Justice Action Network, Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, and Jessica Jackson Sloan, co-founder and national director of #cut50, discussed how a diverse array of groups have come together to champion meaningful criminal justice reform.
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